"Only the strong Rise Above"
Coming of age story about two inner city youths, who are left to fend for themselves over the summer after their mothers are taken away by the authorities.
Social & External
Mister
Pete
Gloria
Alice
Kris
Henry
Sergeant Pike
Clerk
Phillip and Dieter nearly suffocate hiding their sexual identity in the face of puritanical small town values. Joined by a mysterious German relative, the three misfits escape to the big city searching for a place to belong.
After their mother dies and their father leaves them, teenage brothers Tex and Mason McCormick struggle to make it on their own.
Chronicling the troubled existence of Duncan Mudge, a 14-year-old misfit who—while vying for the attention of his vacant father—struggles to fill the void brought on by his mother's sudden death.
Ludovic is waiting for a miracle. With six-year-old certainty, she believes she was meant to be a little girl -- and that the mistake will soon be corrected. But where she expects the miraculous, Ludo finds only rejection, isolation, and guilt -- as the intense reactions of family, friends, and neighbors strip away every innocent lace and bauble.
Two teenage girls run away to Hollywood, chasing stardom, but their dreams lead them into prostitution, trapping them in the dark underbelly of the sex work industry as they travel from Texas to California.
Student Eric kills time by spying on his neighbors. Compulsively taking notes on everything within binocular range from his bedroom window, he harasses his neighbors by sending unsigned notes and making their private affairs public. When they discover his identity and draw him in, will this release him from his solitude, or confirm in his mind that he will always be the outsider?
This semi-autobiographical film by Barry Levinson follows various members of the Kurtzman clan, a Jewish family living in suburban Baltimore during the 1950s. As teenaged Ben completes high school, he falls for Sylvia, a black classmate, creating inevitable tensions. Meanwhile, Ben's brother, Van, attends college and becomes smitten with a mysterious woman while their father tries to maintain his burlesque business.
Socially inept 17-year-old cinephile Lawrence Kweller gets a job at a video store, where he forms a complicated friendship with his older female manager.
Gaby and Fred are preparing for the world swimming championships which will be held in Quebec City this year. Their love will be put to the test when a former love of Gaby's turns up at the championships. Gaby finds herself at a crucial point of her life where she has to choose whether to continue competing or follow another dream that she's cherished forever, but which seems impossible to everyone else—her dream to become an astronaut.
As the Algerian War draws to a close, a teenager with a girlfriend starts feeling homosexual urges for two of his classmates: a country boy, and a French-Algerian intellectual.
A release that features 7 shorts from Italy, Israel, Tunisia, New Zealand, the United States and France, exploring those furtive first steps that men take as they decide to act on their sexuality. The 7 short films are: The First Time [La prima volta] (2012); Kiss Me (2022); Nidhal [نضال] (2022); Sparrow (2016); I Am Mackenzie (2019); The Place Between Us [Il posto fra di noi] (2010); By the End of the Night [Que la nuit s'achève] (2018).
Telling the true story of Marvin Bijou, a young boy from a working-class family in a small village, who suffers constant bullying at school and home for being ‘different’ – too sensitive and too feminine. A chance encounter with a drama teacher opens the doors to a world that offers him the chance to escape his situation.
SARAH is a short film centered around Ayla and her best friend Sarah as they discuss summer plans, specifically, Ayla's "sweet seventeen". All is well until Sarah doesn't pick up Ayla's messages anymore when they are supposed to hang out. As Ayla's birthday nears, the more upset she becomes with Sarah. When the day arrives, Ayla finds herself celebrating her birthday without Sarah and leads to her final straw, spending her seventeenth birthday alone.
STRANGER is a coming-of-age short film that focuses on two neighbors reconciling before one of them goes off to college in Chicago. It is based on a true event that occurred the last day that I was in town before I moved to college. The two characters, Max and Cass, discuss their past together after not talking for years, realizing that they have changed as young adults and miss hanging out but cannot because Cass is leaving while Max stays in town to fix cars. With this last interaction, they get to say goodbye officially on a good note.
In his sophomore year, An faces the pressures of exams, love, and music, realizing that rock n’ roll and passion know no boundaries.
Shortly after Muzamil was born, the village's holy man predicts that he will die at age 20. Muzamil's father can't stand the curse and leaves home. Sakina raises her son as a single mother, overly protective. One day, Muzamil turns 19.
Two 15-year-old girls from different sides of the tracks compete to see who will be first to lose their virginity while at camp.
Forced to leave the comfort of his middle class lifestyle at his father's behest, fourteen-year-old Ahmet is sent to an all-boys religious dormitory where he must navigate familial expectations, his religious obligations, and the childhood to which he so desperately clings.
Eduardo, an 18-year-old kid from a small village in Jalisco, travels to Guadalajara. In this big and strange city, away from the eyes of his parents, he experiences his first encounters in love and sex.
These five award-winning coming of age short films offer a glimpse of how boys and young men tackle life's difficult desires: confronting one's demons, understanding sexual relationships, gaining the respect of one's father, or simply running away from it all. This is only the start of their complex formative years, where not every question has an answer, and not every answer makes sense. The short films are: Boys [Pojkarna] (2015); Ioana (2015); Kiem Holijanda (2017); Picnic [Piknik] (2015); Tomer & Elias [Tomer en Elias] (2016).
15-year-old Rocks fears that she and her little brother Emmanuel will be taken into care and forced apart if anyone finds out that their mother has left them. Against all odds, and with the help of her loyal friends, she evades the authorities and navigates the most defining days of her young life.
Based on a true story. Liz Murray is a young girl who is taken care of by her loving, but drug-addicted parents. Liz becomes homeless at 15 and after a tragedy comes upon her, she begins her work to finish high school.
James White is a troubled twentysomething trying to stay afloat in a frenzied New York City. As he retreats further into a hedonistic lifestyle, his mother's battle with a serious illness faces a series of setbacks that force him to assume more responsibility. With the pressure on him mounting, James must find new reserves of strength or risk imploding completely.
In a world connected by YouTube, iTunes, and Facebook, Lola and her friends navigate the peer pressures of high school romance and friendship while dodging their sometimes overbearing and confused parents. When Lola's mom, Anne, "accidentally" reads her teenage daughter's racy journal, she realizes just how wide their communication gap has grown.
Two kids, Dylan and Kylie, run away from home on Christmas Day and spend a night of magic and terror on the streets of inner-city Dublin.
The story of Bea Johnson from birth to graduation as she navigates life with an intellectually disabled parent and an extended family who can't quite agree on the best way to help.
After moving to a new town, troublemaking teen Jim Stark is supposed to have a clean slate, although being the new kid in town brings its own problems. While searching for some stability, Stark forms a bond with a disturbed classmate, Plato, and falls for local girl Judy. However, Judy is the girlfriend of neighborhood tough, Buzz. When Buzz violently confronts Jim and challenges him to a drag race, the new kid's real troubles begin.
After Margaret, a divorcée living in Dublin, loses her teenage son, she develops an unorthodox relationship with Joe, a homeless youth. Their tentative trust is threatened by his involvement with a violent gang and the escalation of her ex-husband's grieving rage.
Still reeling from a heartbreaking family event and his parents' subsequent divorce, Tyler Hawkins discovers a fresh lease on life when he meets Ally Craig, a gregarious beauty who witnessed her mother's death. But as the couple draws closer, the fallout from their separate tragedies jeopardizes their love.
A smart teenage girl comes of age in a small town with her self-centered parents who had her when they were teenagers.
A troubled Southern man talks to his suicidal sister's psychiatrist about their family history and falls in love with her (and New York City) in the process.
With his mother dead and his father busy at work, Howie feels adrift in his New York suburb. He and his friend Gary spend their time burglarizing their neighbors' homes — until they make the mistake of robbing the house of Big John, a macho former Marine who is also an unrepentant pedophile. He propositions Howie, who declines, but the two eventually develop an unlikely and dangerous friendship.
When a 13-year-old girl befriends a defiant antisocial child of the streets, the mismatched runaways set off to the Big Apple to find their own adventure.
Follows a young boy who runs away from home in the search of his estranged mother.
Desperate to be rid of her toddler, a dissatisfied Beverly Hills housewife hires a stranger to babysit and ends up getting much more than she bargained for.
In 1979 Santa Barbara, California, Dorothea Fields is a determined single mother in her mid-50s who is raising her adolescent son, Jamie, at a moment brimming with cultural change and rebellion. Dorothea enlists the help of two younger women – Abbie, a free-spirited punk artist living as a boarder in the Fields' home and Julie, a savvy and provocative teenage neighbour – to help with Jamie's upbringing.
Widowed mother Mildred must suddenly redefine herself and find an outlet for her nurturing side when her adult daughter moves out of the family home. Though Mildred thinks she's found her purpose when her neighbor, overworked single mother Monica, asks her to look after her little boy, she has great difficulty learning to strike a healthy balance between giving selflessly to others and remembering to take care of herself.
The Chumscrubber is a dark comedy about the lives of people who live in upper-class suburbia. It all begins when Dean Stiffle finds the body of his friend, Troy. He doesn't bother telling any of the adults because he knows they won't care. Everyone in town is too self consumed to worry about anything else than themselves. And everybody is on some form of drug just to get through their days.
The streets of the Bronx are owned by '60s youth gangs where the joy and pain of adolescence is lived. Philip Kaufman tells his take on the novel by Richard Price about the history of the Italian-American gang ‘The Wanderers.’
When Ruby and Rhett's parents are killed in a car accident, their carefree teenage lives are suddenly shattered. Moving to an incredible house in Malibu with the Glasses', old friends of the family, seems to be the beginning of a new life for them.